A Clockwork Orange (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 film that opens with a young man staring directly into the camera, a glass of milk-plus raised to his lips, and the audience already unsettled before a single act of violence occurs. That young man is Alex DeLarge, played by Malcolm McDowell, and by the time the film is over he will have beaten a vagrant, crippled a writer, been imprisoned, psychologically dismantled by the state, and then handed a government job as though none of it happened. Stanley Kubrick wrote, produced, and directed this adaptation of Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel, and what he made polarised critics, inspired copycat violence by his own account, and was pulled from British cinemas for nearly three decades. The questions the film raises are not comfortable ones. What does it mean to be good? Can goodness manufactured through pain count as goodness at all? And when two political forces both claim to want order, which one is actually the more dangerous? These are not rhetorical questions in Kubrick's hands. They drive every scene.

• 2. Alex and His Droogs

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  Malcolm McDowell was cast after Kubrick saw him in the 1968 film if.... Kubrick told him plainly: "You can exude intelligence on the screen." That intelligence matters, because Alex is not a simple thug. He narrates the film in Nadsat, a fractured adolescent slang built from Slavic languages, especially Russian, English, and Cockney rhyming slang. Burgess designed the slang partly to pull readers into the characters' world and partly to prevent the material from dating. The word "droogs" itself comes from the Russian word for friend or buddy. Alex's gang consists of Pete, played by Michael Tarn; Georgie, played by James Marcus; and Dim, played by Warren Clarke. Their crimes include beating a vagrant, fighting a rival gang, and the attack on writer Frank Alexander, whom they cripple while Alex rapes Alexander's wife, singing "Singin' in the Rain" as he does so. That song was not in the novel at all. It was an improvisation by McDowell on the fifth day of filming the scene, after Kubrick complained the rape scene was too stiff and asked if he could dance. McDowell chose it because it was the only song he, by his own account, "sort of knew half the lyrics to".

• 3. The Ludovico Question

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  Two years into a 14-year prison sentence for murder, Alex volunteers as a test subject for an experimental aversion therapy promoted by the Minister of the Interior, played by Anthony Sharp. The Ludovico Technique, as the film calls it, straps him to a chair, clamps his eyes open, injects him with drugs, and forces him to watch films of sex and violence. Some of those films are accompanied by Beethoven, whom Alex adores. The result is that hearing Beethoven makes him physically ill. The film's prison chaplain objects immediately, arguing that Alex has been robbed of free will, and that goodness forced from the outside is no goodness at all. The Minister disagrees, arguing the technique will cut crime and ease overcrowding in prisons, with the freed space earmarked for political prisoners. Kubrick described the film in Saturday Review as "a social satire dealing with the question of whether behavioural psychology and psychological conditioning are dangerous new weapons for a totalitarian government." The Ludovico Technique is widely read as a parody of aversion therapy, a form of classical conditioning. Psychiatrist Aaron Stern, the former head of the MPAA rating board, viewed Alex before treatment as man in his natural state and the post-treatment sickness as neurosis imposed by society.

• 4. Politics on Both Sides

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  Frank Alexander, played by Patrick Magee, is the writer Alex crippled. After Alex is released and collapses on his doorstep, Alexander tries to weaponise him politically. He does not recognise Alex at first, but when Alex sings "Singin' in the Rain" in the bath, Alexander understands. He drugs Alex and plays Beethoven's Ninth Symphony loudly from the floor below, knowing the sound will cause him unbearable pain. Alex jumps from the window in a suicide attempt. In a telephone conversation that the source records, Alexander describes the government's tactics as "the thin end of the wedge" toward totalitarianism. Kubrick countered that this made neither side sympathetic. He told film critics Philip Strick and Penelope Houston: "The Minister, played by Anthony Sharp, is clearly a figure of the Right. The writer, Patrick Magee, is a lunatic of the Left... They differ only in their dogma. Their means and ends are hardly distinguishable." Both forces use Alex as a tool. The government jails Alexander on the pretext of protecting Alex, then offers Alex a government job in exchange for public relations support. Alex ends the film thinking, "I was cured, all right!" which in context is not reassuring.

• 5. Making the Film

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  Filming ran from September 1970 through April 1971, and the shoot was physically punishing for McDowell. During the Ludovico technique scene, he scratched a cornea and was temporarily blinded. A real physician stood beside him throughout to apply saline solution and prevent his eyes from drying. He also cracked ribs filming the humiliation stage show. To capture Alex's point of view as he jumps from the window, the crew dropped a Newman-Sinclair clockwork camera in a box, lens-first, from the third floor of the Corus Hotel. The camera survived six takes. Kubrick used extreme wide-angle lenses, including a Kinoptik Tegea 9.8 mm for 35 mm Arriflex cameras, to create the distorted, dreamlike visual quality the film required. McDowell described Kubrick's method as total control over every detail, comparing him to a General Chief of Staff. Kubrick's production involved thousands of photographs taken of potential locations before any camera turned. Alex's residence was filmed at a failed municipal housing block, a location McDowell notes on the DVD commentary as deliberate, with the address "Municipal Flat Block 18A, Linear North" nodding to socialist-style architecture.

• 6. Sound and Music

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  Wendy Carlos arranged an electronic version of the Scherzo and other parts of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony specifically for the film. The main theme is an electronic arrangement drawn from Henry Purcell's Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary. The soundtrack also includes two of Edward Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance Marches. Contrary to what viewers might expect given Alex's obsession with Beethoven, the soundtrack actually contains more music by Rossini than by Beethoven. Rossini's William Tell Overture and The Thieving Magpie Overture accompany the fast-motion sex scene, the slow-motion fight between Alex and his gang, the drive to the writer's home, the invasion of the Cat Lady's home, and the moment Alex contemplates suicide by the river. Kubrick wanted to include the Pink Floyd song "Atom Heart Mother" but the band refused. The deliberate mismatch between cheerful, familiar music and scenes of brutality became one of the film's most discussed formal choices.

• 7. Controversy and Withdrawal

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  A Clockwork Orange premiered in New York City on the 19th of December 1971 and opened in the United Kingdom on the 13th of January 1972. In the United States, it received an X rating in its original 1972 release. Kubrick later replaced approximately 30 seconds of footage to obtain an R rating re-release later that same year. The National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures rated it C, meaning condemned, a category it recommended Roman Catholics avoid. In the United Kingdom, the film was linked by prosecutors to the manslaughter of a schoolboy by a 14-year-old defendant in March 1972. It was also connected to the murder of an elderly vagrant by a 16-year-old in Bletchley, Buckinghamshire. The press further blamed it for a rape in which attackers sang a version of "Singin' in the Rain." Christiane Kubrick, the director's wife, said the family received threats and had protesters outside their home. Warner Bros. withdrew the film from British release in 1973 at Kubrick's request. The Scala Cinema Club went into receivership in 1993 after losing a legal battle following an unauthorised screening. The ban remained effective until Kubrick died in 1999. The film was passed uncut in Ireland on the 13th of December 1999. In Singapore, the ban was not lifted until the 28th of October 2011, when it screened as part of the Perspectives Film Festival.

• 8. Reception and Legacy

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  The film grossed $41 million in the United States and roughly $73 million overseas, against a production budget of $1.3 million. In France it was the most popular film of 1972, with 7,611,745 admissions. It received four nominations at the 44th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and an equivalent set of nominations from the British Academy. The New York Film Critics Circle named it Best Film and gave Kubrick Best Director and McDowell Best Actor. Vincent Canby, writing in The New York Times, praised McDowell's performance and Kubrick's technical control, later calling the film "a brilliant and dangerous work." Roger Ebert gave it two stars on first viewing, calling it an "ideological mess." Pauline Kael's New Yorker review, titled "Stanley Strangelove," called it pornographic for the way it treated Alex's victims. By 1987, Ebert had softened, saying on his television program At the Movies that while he still thought the film had "all head and no heart," he found Kubrick's detachment from the violence more legible on a second look. In 2020, the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." In the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight and Sound polls, it ranked 75th in the directors' poll and 235th in the critics' poll. Spanish director Luis Buñuel once named it his current favourite, saying: "I was predisposed against the film. After seeing it, I realised it is only a movie about what the modern world really means."